Synopsis: Within a travelling carnival and its sideshow
"freak" attractions, the owner Hans (Earles), a midget, falls in love with the Amazonian trapeze artist
Cleopatra (Baclanova). Unfortunately
Cleopatra is in cahoots with the strongman Hercules (Victor), and the pair as well as being cruel and abusive to those
within the sideshow have a plan for Cleo to marry Hans and poison him to claim his
financial inheritance. However, as a carnival barker who bookends the film
states, the sideshow "freaks" including a living torso, a bearded
woman and "Pinheads" live by a code. In a world where they are
discriminated against, they have their own community where they protect each
other and deal with their own foibles; those from the outside who befriend
them, including animal trainer Venus (Hyams)
and Phroso the Clown (Ford), will be
treated as equals, while those who trespass against them will suffer horrible
consequences.

A lot of cineastes will know of Freak's notoriety. Banned in the United
Kingdom, causing outrage in its country of origins, sold to Dwain Esper to be churned
out on the grindhouse tent circuit until it was critically revaluated, living
with the reputation as a thirties horror film that still surprises. More so
today with political correctness, the film from the title to some of the words
in the synopsis will be even more uncomfortable without having seen the film,
and even to the cast it was a film both championed but also damned for its
depiction of those with physical differences. As someone who grew up with a
learning disability, autism, whilst I cannot compare to someone like Prince Randian, the living torso, who
had no limbs to speak of, viewing Freaks
more and more since I saw it the first time in college film studies has a
different perspective for me as someone not part of "normal" society
even if it's not because of a physical handicap.

From http://breakfastwithplato.com/wp-content/uploads/
2015/05/freaks-1932-large-picture.jpg

In testament to the film, Freaks never mocks the titular
individuals. While in broad brushes depicting the lives within a circus, the
brief snippets of a community are rich as they stand. Tod Browning did run away with the circus when he was young and throughout
there are many aspects to the film that couldn't be seen in anyway but
heartening. A community where everyone helped each other, married and had kids
as the human skeleton and the bearded lady do in one scene, and whilst the film
is fictitious the normalisation of everyone's lives and letting actual sideshow
attractions act is a huge virtue. The rawness of amateur performers is matched
by the charisma of everyone, from Schlitzie
the pinhead (actually a man playing a woman) to the already mentioned Prince Randian, who only gets one moment
but shines just from showing how you don't need limbs to light a cigarette. That
the film was cut down to only around an hour does mean a lot was probably lost
that would've been exceptional to see, but what snippets remain are utterly
inspiring and subversive in seeing these people be filmed having meals and
merely gossiping between themselves. This is where even someone like myself
with a mental disability can embrace this film more beyond a love of the movie,
where not only is there solidarity between the sideshow, but also how it shows
how ordinary they are even if their lives travelling could've been exciting and
full of gossip. The film's in the same vein of the Universal horror movies of the thirties that it was meant to
capitalise on, a lurid carnival drama also in the vein of the decade later Nightmare Alley (1947) where deceit and
murder plots bubble up. Barring a finale where people crawl in the mud during a
rainstorm with knifes ready, the horror movie moment, this exists in-between
dramas as a pot-boiler which straddles the line between respectability and
being offensive. The film for me is the former, but it still gladly provokes
taboos. Just before the Hays Code, which was already created, finally clamped
down on what it perceived to be morally offensive material, you had films in
the early thirties which still stand out for how brazen and quite progressive
they still are. Hans is openly wooing Cleopatra, hinting of an eroticism that
is still not tackled in cinema a great deal, and more openly subversive is to
be found the subplot with real life Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton playing
sisters who are planning to marry their respective suitors, one of the funniest
parts of the film for imagining how the arguments with the sister-in-law is
going to turn out like but also hinting at more when both sisters can feel the
sensations of the other.

From http://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/freaks1.png

You can easily connect Freaks, even though it was and always
will have meant to be a horror movie to scare, to the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier'sThe Idiots (1998)
and Ulrich Seidl, all of which have
prodded the taboos of either (or both) physical and mental disability, Freaks by possible coincidence being an
ancestor of them in disregarding the safety bubble used around the subject. Whilst
no way near as explicit as those films, and not in their cult/art cinema
environment, this still does everything those examples do - showing the disabled
as human beings, far from perfect, passionate and even having sexual desire. This
doesn't detract from Freaks being a
fun film, with a proto-Tales From The
Crypt twist that's nasty, but the humanity is still worth relishing too.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Freaks-2.jpg

Technical Detail:

The one flaw with Freaks that I've
finally overcome, but must be bared in mind, is that as an early thirties
movie, it had to grapple with the introduction of sound and how films would now
have to be made, visible in its basic cinematic structure. Browning was said never to be comfortable with sound - Dracula (1931) is an utterly sluggish
and misshapen creation even with Bela
Lugosi - and Freaks is a quietly
put together work as a result of this. The content is what Freaks succeeds though, not elaborate technique you can find in
another great film like Rouben Mamoulian'sDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). This
was why it took a while for me to fully embrace Freaks over all these years, superficiality no longer a bias.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WeC8r2kZajo/maxresdefault.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

The term "grotesque"
could've been used but for me that would be utterly offensive to the people in
the film. There should be a distancing of that word away from connotations of
physical deformity and disability by itself barring the extreme realms of body
horror and its fictitious exaggerations. Grotesque for me should represent
exaggeration and transgressive material like taboo sexuality or the worst in
mankind's behaviour. I could use the word for if I cover an Ulrich Seidl film. Another work based
around a carnival "freakshow", the notorious anime Midori (1992), could also qualify for
the word as would Horrors of Malformed
Men (1969), a film banned in its home country exactly for the concerns of
it being offensive to the disabled but firmly entrenched in a truly strange
reality instead.

Aside from this, Freaks isn't a weird film at all. Barring
having real sideshow performers play themselves rather than using practical effects,
nothing is unconventional from other movies. Nothing is abstract and there is
no cinematic techniques which effect the content. Having the performers be real
sideshow attractions is confrontational, causing people to react and if the
legend is true it caused a violent reaction at its original premier. The rest
of the film is a melodrama with lots of dialogue, mostly if not all shot
statically without anything to baffle. Now
if what I've heard is true about Tod
Browning's silent films, where dialogue wasn't an issue, films like The Unknown (1927) which made his name
with Lon Chaney could be awesome and
utterly strange too.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/
freaks-1932-001-two-men-in-the-rain-car-detail.jpg?itok=7KR2ZtNt

Personal Opinion:

This was and still is a unique
film, still utterly provocative to a modern audience, and despite its technical
limitations, the boldness of the premise is still strong. It could be seen as
sad, it would still be shocking, but firmly on the side of the titular
characters, it champions them as much as it would offend others. This is also a
film which doesn't fall into the annoying convention of the normal defeating
the outsider evil. Here instead it's the outsiders who are the good people and
the apparently normal people are evil, a simple idea far and away more relevant
and more entertaining now in a fun film than most horror movies that do the
opposite.

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"I could go on for hours with more examples. The list is endless. You probably never gave it a thought, but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason. And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason." - Rubber (2010)

About Me

I am 28 years old and hail from England. For the last few years I have been a growing fan of cinema and have decided to take the next step into blogging about it and any other tangents that about the things I'm interested in I get onto.